By Fayen Wong

PERTH, July 7 (Reuters) - The debut of Australia ASX Ltd's first deliverable thermal coal futures failed to attract any business on its Tuesday launch.

The coal futures, based on free-on-board Newcastle coal , saw no bids, offers or deals placed. The front-month October contract settled at $71 a tonne.

'Liquidity will take some time to build up. It didn't happen overnight for globalCOAL and likewise, this will take some time to gather momentum,' said an Australian-based trader.

ASX's thermal coal futures competes with the futures contracts launched in December by Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) using electronic trading platform globalCOAL's NEWC price benchmark.

The deliverable feature on ASX's futures separates it from ICE's NEWC coal futures contract, which is a financial product.

Participants can use the contract either directly through the ASX platform or place their bids or offers with their over-the-counter brokers.

Trading hours for the contracts are between 8:34 am - 4:30 pm (Australian Eastern State time) and between 5:14 pm - 7:00 am.

The launch of ASX's coal futures in a region where large buyers have been slow to embrace hedging, have prompted some market players to question if the platform can gather sufficient liquidity.

'This is a new product altogether and we expect it will draw a new pool of liquidity from existing market players,' Anthony Collins, general manager of emerging markets at ASX, told Reuters. 'It won't be stealing liquidity from globalCOAL.'

ASX said its deliverable coal futures and options contracts could serve as a forward price alternative to the existing editorial and over-the-counter (OTC) derived indexes used for swap contracts and index-linked supply agreements.

It said it will also present opportunities to arbitrage existing index-based swaps and related option products.

(Reporting by Fayen Wong)

((fayen.wong@thomsonreuters.com; +618 9456 1947; Reuters Messaging: fayen.wong.reuters.com@reuters.net)) Keywords: ASX COAL/DEBUT/

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